Greedy Goblin

Thursday, May 5, 2016

BDO: Amity and quests

As I've said, main levels are gained from grinding. (Combat) skillpoints are gained both from combat and quests. But Contribution Points and bag space come from quests. The main questline and the default "kill 10 wolves" (mixed with "kill wolves until you get to know their weakness") quests are fine to get enough CP to activate the nods where you happen to level and allow turning in trade coins.

"Life" quests give the majority of CP and you'll need a lot of that (soft cap is around 300) for your industry, unless you want to live from grinding mobs forever (you probably don't). Many life quests are activated simply by turning them on at the top of the quests interface. These range from "go to other NPC and give a gift" to "get 10 Maple timbers" (that's actually repeatable and the NPC stands 5 feet from the market NPC in Heidel).

Other quests are opened when the NPC likes you enough. This is called "amity". You can raise amity by a "chatting" minigame, which is hard to start, due to translation mistakes in the UI. So I actually make a guide here instead of linking, just to let you start it. You can hone your "chatting" skills later after you can actually defeat this monster. By the way, like in EVE, being "social" means socializing with NPC agents. Socializing with other players is called "PvP".

At first, you need to collect "knowledges", things to chat about. You get them from other NPCs. When you see a little ? on the minimap, that's an NPC you don't know. Talk to her and you get at least get to know her (get the knowledge of that NPC) and usually she offers this or that knowledge for a few energy points. Some NPCs refuse to talk to you until referred by another. You get to know monsters by killing them until you learn their weaknesses. You learn places by visiting them. Finally some topics are told by NPCs if you do quests or raise enough amity. The one in the picture offers three knowledges at higher amity. Each NPC has a favorite topic and when you talk to them, you see it on the left side. That box also contains all the knowledges of that topic, with the unknown ones replaced by ????????. If you have many unknowns, your options will be limited and you are advised not to try the minigame for anything else than getting to 10-50 amity. Playing the minigame costs energy and you run out of that very fast if you do life quests. Energy replenishes 20/hour.

So, on the top you see the the task. There are 5 types, you can get the details here, I just get you started:

Spark interest: Mouseover knowledges, and select ones with high percentage in the yellow box

Fail to spark interest: opposite

Get accumulated favor: to get it, you both have to spark interest and get high favor, which is the second line in the yellow box. So the example knowledge isn't the best for this goal with 0-0.

Get maximum Favor: similar to accumulated, but if you fail a topic, the counter resets, so you must have a chain of knowledges that provide the goal in one run

Talk freely: lucky round, sure win

After solving the minigame, you get amity and can quit and keep it or risk it and get more. If you choose the first and play again instead, you need to sacrifice energy points again.

There is one more thing to talk about: knowledge combos: the first is that if your chance is higher than 100% at one knowledge, only 100% is displayed and some extra goes to the next knowledge, so a 60% knowledge will have more than 60% chance to succeed if it's after a 100% knowledge. Secondly, some knowledges have special effects, for example this one has "After 5 turns, Interest Level will be reduced [sic] by 10 for 3 turns." This means that if it's the first knowledge in the chain, the 6th, the 7th and the 8th will get +10 Sparking interest, greatly increasing their success chance. You don't have to count, because the tooltips of the inserted knowledges will show it - partially:

Same combos exist for favors too. When you see only 4-5 slots in the minigame, some will be visited twice. Good luck with the minigame and remember, if it's too hard, you probably miss important knowledges, come back later.

Finally: the amity shop. The shop of the NPC or some items in it are locked until you reach the needed amity. When you buy these items, you lose the amity, so you have to raise it again to buy. As the minigame costs more energy at high amity, it's dumb to raise it to 300 to buy 3x100 amity items. Raise it to 100, buy one item, repeat. I made my first "big" money for buying the lowest horse saddle from the stable master for 10000 (or 15K?) coins and 100 amity and sold it for 35K coins in the marketplace.

Finally a headache-stopping advice: the annoying battlecries at every single attack is under "dialog" and not "combat sound". Turn that off and your head won't hurt!
A question: can you (and how) transfer coins or items from one player to another?

10 comments:

I can't understand how anyone who has seriously played Eve can even consider "MMO"s with separate server shards. Nothing anyone does matters on a different shard, so there can't be a meaningful economy. There's just not enough individuals interacting to make an interesting economy.

Eve is literally unique for it's single-shard. This is an advantage that I can't imagine Mr. Goblin dismissing. I can't understand how he could think that a multi-shard game could possibly be more compelling that a single-shard.

Hm, about terrible UI (or UX) - I just started playing "Warframe" (yes, instead of EVE...) and that one too has a counter-intuitive interface. Like getting into your inventory at the end of a three layer menu ... Well, at least that one was written in English.

You can only trade coins and items to your own alt cahracters on the same account (family) by dropping them in the bank and withdrawing them with the other character.

Between other accounts you can only trade (most) consumables like potions and stat buff foods. After you trade these items to someone those items become bound immediatly and cant be retraded ever again. They kept consumable trading in for the ability to give your party members some potions or statbuffs if they dont have them, for immediate use, but it is almost useless as a form of payment as you can never use them again as payment after receiving.

Storage is shared: you can put silver into storage and then take it out on another alt. You can convert silver to gold bars at the storage vendors (under the currency tab) if you want to transport your money from one city to another.

'Interest Level' means 'level at which the NPC is interested'; if it's lower then it's easier to interest the NPC. It's actually correct - but yeah, it's not at all clear what it means. You're correct about 'Interest' under Interaction Effect, however: no reason at all it shouldn't read 'Favour'.

and.. I should have added this in my initial comment: for best money via the amity gain, talk to the blacksmith in Velia and buy his Agerian armor: you can sell the chest piece for 5x the buying price, with a quick sale. Same for the arms vendor selling steel daggers, and the blacksmith in Heidel selling Taritas armor (although that sells less quickly).

There is no way to transfer money or anything outside the stipulated prices. Makes the whole ingame economy a joke.

Also I'm not sure if you noticed already or not, but BDO is not a sandbox either. It's basically a grind based themepark with some extra side activities.

As for the Amity game, take a look at Mevo in Altinova. If you can stand the boredom, you'll make millions dumping all your energy on him to sell grunil armors (you could also save them since they're a useful set for endgame).